Using Mi-Forms for Email: Eating Our Own Dog Food

At Mi-Corporation, as at many companies, email is one of our main modes of communication aside from meetings and phone calls. Very often these days, I find myself emailing the key members of my team from my phone, using voice dictation. I happen to use Google's speech recognition technology via a Samsung Galaxy S4. As user interface designers, we are very aware of the number of steps any given function takes, such as with sending an email.

For example, sending an email to a team member from my phone requires:

1. opening the Android email app

2. tapping the compose icon

3. positioning the cursor in the To: field

4. entering a few characters of an email address (possibly as few as one or two)

5. selecting the email address from the list of auto-completed choices

6. dictating the body of the email

7. tapping the send icon.

To test our Mi-Forms mobile data capture software on phones, we have designed a Mi-Forms form to perform this function. It performs this function in fewer steps than the Android email app.

The Mi-Forms client software uploads the data to the Mi-Forms Server, where emails to the selected members of the team are formatted and sent. Smartphones certainly provide other ways to quickly dictate emails, but our Mi-Forms solution gives us another way to eat our own dog food.

Eat Your Own Dog Food Definition | Investopedia

A colloquialism that describes a company using its own products or services for its internal operations. The . . .